How to get started in a career when the very notion of career is changing is the subject of Work This Way by Bruce Tulgan. The author runs a think tank devoted to the work lives of those post-Baby Boomers labeled “Generation X.” The media image is of “slackers,” but if 20-somethings follow the career plans offered in this book, which involve self-starting, continual education and all-around aggressiveness, they’ll prove themselves the hardest-working generation in memory. Starting with trends such as permanent downsizing, the rise of temporary employment and the increase in small business start-ups, Tulgan makes the point that more than ever people need to be entrepreneurial and creative about their careers. The changing job market offers more risks and rewards. People have to learn how to negotiate, keep their options open and keep learning. Tulgan provides lots of lists and mini-case studies of young people struggling and succeeding. His relentlessly upbeat advice is general but not vague. While directed to young people getting started, there’s worthy advice here for everyone in the work world.

Reviewed by Neil Lipschutz.

Bring together a few people in a defined setting and sooner or later you have conflict. It doesn’t matter if it’s an old-age or new-age workplace. Any workplace will have at least a few people, some making judgments about the performance of others, some giving others instruction or direction. There will be conflicts, sometimes of a nature that have to change people’s relationships. Finding as positive as possible solutions to conflict is the subject of Getting to Resolution, by mediator and attorney Stewart Levine. If more people followed Levine’s advice, the world would be a better place. There would be less litigation and, more importantly, less lingering bitterness in the aftermath of conflict.

Levine’s step-by-step approach to resolution often involves a mediator, but at its heart it requires the people involved to face each other and to air their grievances. There has to be an authentic desire to reach a resolution that can be accepted by both sides. This is not easy. Because of that difficulty, people usually hide behind professionals, usually lawyers, to be their advocates, and they turn to others, usually courts, to resolve their disputes. The author takes a basically optimistic view of people, “Taking care of others is natural for human beings.” Such optimism is necessary in order to get people to confront problems with others head-on and come out with two winners, or at least two people who feel they received a fair shake and are ready to move on with their lives.

As a mediator, Levine brings a useful sense of perspective to the disputes he helps resolve. People in the heat of a dispute often think nothing is more important than their problem. He writes, “Often the essential part of resolution is reframing the perceived problem into something else. Asking people to look back from their Ôdeathbed’ is a good way to get into the discussion.” Though at times repetitive, Levine makes a solid case for a preferable path toward resolving problems. The methods can be applied to dissolving a business partnership or a marriage.

Reviewed by Neal Lipschutz.

Women’s Work Maybe someday there won’t be a genre of women in business books. Maybe someday the experiences of women in the business world won’t be all that different from men’s experiences. For now, though, the shelves groan with women’s biz books that tellingly share one characteristic: They all deal with women’s struggles to triumph over obstacles strewn into their financial and career paths by human biology, corporate tradition, and, of course, men. This month, we look at four new releases in this still-rich vein.

Anne E. Francis probes an especially thorny phenomenon in The Daughter Also Rises: How Women Overcome Obstacles and Advance in the Family-Owned Business (Rudi Publishing, $16.95, 0945213387). This is not a book of caricature. It shows, among other truths, that Dad does not have to be Archie Bunker to stand in the way of his little girl’s success at the family company. In fact, sometimes a father’s (or mother’s) best intentions may be just the problem, trapping the adult daughter in a childlike workplace dependency.

Francis, a business consultant with a doctorate in social work, draws on her experience of counseling families on the broad spectrum of issues business and (often deeply) personal that arise when blood and business mix. Through cogent, real-world examples and incisive analysis, she sheds light on topics that might seem unfathomable and might seem unrelated to the running of a business. It turns out, for instance, that a mother’s repressed envy of her daughter’s success, and a father’s unspoken discomfort in the presence of his adolescent daughter long ago, can have plenty to do with business when families work together.

The author’s language is refreshingly free of psychobabble, taking on daunting psychological subject matter with admirable clarity. For ambitious women and the people who love them, The Daughter Also Rises offers a roadmap to uncharted territory.

It has been argued before that women have their own way of doing business, distinct from the structures of traditional, male-dominated corporate life. Bearing out that argument are many of the extraordinary life stories sketched out in Conversations with Uncommon Women: Insights from Women Who’ve Risen Above Life’s Challenges to Achieve Extraordinary Success (Amacom, $22.95, 0814405207), by Ellie Wymard.

Of the 100 women we meet here, some are famous (former Texas Governor Ann Richards, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, Ruth Fertel of Ruth’s Chris Steak House), others lesser-known. But they’re all in business, whether the business is working behind the scenes in a political campaign or running an arts organization or starting a small business on the kitchen table.

As Wymard’s women stretch the bounds of what we normally think of as business, they puncture stereotypes along the way. There’s a surprise on nearly every page. When we meet Mary Agee, who gained brief and unwanted fame some years ago as the female executive whose romantic involvement with the CEO led to chaos at Bendix Corp., we don’t read some Oprah story of how she has personally grown from the experience. What Mary Agee does these days is not about Mary Agee; it’s about making a difference in the lives of troubled women. Productively, without fanfare and without taking sides in the abortion debate, the foundation she runs helps women cope with unexpected pregnancies.

Wymard vividly sketches the turning points in many of these women’s lives. In one portrait, for instance, we see successful ad exec Kip Tiernan stopped dead in her tracks in a church aisle, suddenly uttering Holy something (not a word one says in church): It’s not a prayer; it’s an epiphany, after which she is destined to spend the rest of her life as a gadfly activist on behalf of Boston’s homeless.

The author also offers trenchant insights on how women run organizations. One female CEO tells Wymard she wishes she could be tougher on some employees, but senses that she is expected to have a more collaborative style of management because of her gender. People think I’m nice, this executive says, and I’m not sure that’s true. They don’t give me any choice! Kathleen Neville’s Internal Affairs: The Abuse of Power, Sexual Harassment, and Hypocrisy in the Workplace (McGraw-Hill, $24.95, 0071342567) takes us to a darker corner of the working world. It’s a little hard to believe that a book like this needed to be written, almost a decade after the nationwide sexual-harassment-sensitivity stand-down brought on by the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. Yet here we are on the cusp of a new millennium, and women can’t be assured they won’t be accosted by a creep while they work. Nor that the creep won’t be the boss.

Neville, an educator, arbitrator, and expert on sexual harassment, has spent a lot of time getting inside the heads of victims, harassers, corporate officials, and others affected by harassment cases. Her horror stories of actual cases drive home a point that won’t be lost on senior managers who think it can’t happen in my shop it can happen, no matter how much camaraderie your employees seem to enjoy, no matter how upstanding a guy your scoutmaster-father-of-three-EVP-for-marketing may seem to be, no matter what boilerplate language you have put in your employee handbook about your supposedly zero-tolerance policy on workplace harassment.

Equally valuable are the detailed composite scenarios that Neville presents in order to explain the varying moral and social perspectives that come into play in harassment cases. The book is like a series of role-playing exercises, inviting readers to see things, just briefly, from the point of view of the board of directors (who may consider it more cost-effective to pay off claims than to lose a valued top exec); the competing lawyers (who tend to spring unwelcome surprises on both adversaries and clients in the course of the settlement process); the victim (often tormented by self-doubt about the incidents); and the harasser (who may be a calculating predator in the corner office or may be Lennie from the mail room, who figures the girls upstairs appreciate being told they’re kinda hot).

In these scenarios, the author does not address the possibility of false harassment claims by vindictive employees. (It would be interesting to know whether that omission reflects a partisan stance on her part or the fact that, in her experience, such claims simply don’t happen.) Still, Neville sheds light where there has mostly been heat in the past, moving beyond battle-of-the-sexes polemics to convey real understanding about how sexual harassment happens and how companies can prevent it. Internal Affairs is a comprehensive and eye-opening primer on a subject that today’s corporate honchos wish away at their peril.

Enough about women at work what’s a lady to do with her hard-earned dough? For starters, don’t let some piggish man get his mitts on it. Heidi Evans offers that advice in How to Hide Money from Your Husband . . . and Other Time-Honored Ways to Build a Nest Egg: The Best Kept Secret of a Good Marriage (Simon and Schuster, $20, 0684841878). This is an unabashedly one-sided book. Evans says men are past masters at hiding money from women, whether the purpose is to finance secret affairs or to keep a wife from getting part of the marital estate in a divorce. It’s high time, she argues, that women play the same game.

More intriguingly, Evans finds that women have been hiding money from their husbands since time immemorial. A more than adequate amateur anthropologist, she delves into the unrecorded history of women’s home lives, uncovering stories of women who spent lifetimes building secret, five-figure nest eggs. Some wives do it to protect themselves in shaky marriages. Others do it to protect the feckless men they love from their own bad habits.

The book presents plenty of cautionary tales about women who trusted their cheating husbands too much or too long, until divorce brought financial ruin. There are stories of depressingly mercenary men as well as women. But the most interesting relationships chronicled here are the ones in which a little financial secrecy really has been the key to a strong marriage, enabling the woman to feel a measure of control over her life and providing a slush fund from which the whole family benefits. How to Hide Money is an eye-opening look at how money and power are intertwined in a marriage, and how women can hold onto their share of both.

Briefly noted: Even in today’s booming economy, shocking numbers of Americans still carry crippling credit-card balances and other installment debts that can leave them feeling financially trapped. Slash Your Debt: Save Money and Secure Your Future, by debt counselor Gerri Detweiler and writers Marc Eisenson and Nancy Castleman, offers a concise and understandable roadmap for getting out of the money pit.

In Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in Your Workplace (Amacom, $25, 0814404804), authors Ron Zemke, Claire Raines, and Bob Filipczak address the conflicting generational values to be found in any large group of employees. And they look to the future, predicting that today’s adolescent Nexters will come full circle, tending to share more values in common with their 60-to-80-year-old Veteran elders than with any social cohorts in-between.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

While we nod our heads at positive examples to emulate, we all know the 9-to-5 world doesn’t always allow us to practice enlightened work habits. That’s where When Smart People Work for Dumb Bosses by William Lundin, Ph.

D. and Kathleen Lundin comes in. It features dispatches from the dark side of the office, where dictatorial bosses break people’s spirits and shoddy management practices dominate. The authors write, “. . . dumbness at work deserves as serious a study as smartness.” What’s offered here is a host of testimonials by employees to the wrongheaded policies of their superiors. After each case study, the authors offer a short analysis of the negative dynamics at play. Authors William Lundin and Kathleen Lundin, who are consultants and the founders of Worklife Productions, roam across a host of industries to uncover dysfunctional scenarios. They document the resulting downside when today’s management trends don’t work, from the use of teams to employee empowerment to flatter hierarchies. They also ruminate about why some people stay in bad work situations for long periods of time. Sometimes the only answer is to move on.

Reviewed by Neal Lipschutz.

Women’s Work Maybe someday there won’t be a genre of women in business books. Maybe someday the experiences of women in the business world won’t be all that different from men’s experiences. For now, though, the shelves groan with women’s biz books that tellingly share one characteristic: They all deal with women’s struggles to triumph over obstacles strewn into their financial and career paths by human biology, corporate tradition, and, of course, men. This month, we look at four new releases in this still-rich vein.

Anne E. Francis probes an especially thorny phenomenon in The Daughter Also Rises: How Women Overcome Obstacles and Advance in the Family-Owned Business (Rudi Publishing, $16.95, 0945213387). This is not a book of caricature. It shows, among other truths, that Dad does not have to be Archie Bunker to stand in the way of his little girl’s success at the family company. In fact, sometimes a father’s (or mother’s) best intentions may be just the problem, trapping the adult daughter in a childlike workplace dependency.

Francis, a business consultant with a doctorate in social work, draws on her experience of counseling families on the broad spectrum of issues business and (often deeply) personal that arise when blood and business mix. Through cogent, real-world examples and incisive analysis, she sheds light on topics that might seem unfathomable and might seem unrelated to the running of a business. It turns out, for instance, that a mother’s repressed envy of her daughter’s success, and a father’s unspoken discomfort in the presence of his adolescent daughter long ago, can have plenty to do with business when families work together.

The author’s language is refreshingly free of psychobabble, taking on daunting psychological subject matter with admirable clarity. For ambitious women and the people who love them, The Daughter Also Rises offers a roadmap to uncharted territory.

It has been argued before that women have their own way of doing business, distinct from the structures of traditional, male-dominated corporate life. Bearing out that argument are many of the extraordinary life stories sketched out in Conversations with Uncommon Women: Insights from Women Who’ve Risen Above Life’s Challenges to Achieve Extraordinary Success (Amacom, $22.95, 0814405207), by Ellie Wymard.

Of the 100 women we meet here, some are famous (former Texas Governor Ann Richards, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, Ruth Fertel of Ruth’s Chris Steak House), others lesser-known. But they’re all in business, whether the business is working behind the scenes in a political campaign or running an arts organization or starting a small business on the kitchen table.

As Wymard’s women stretch the bounds of what we normally think of as business, they puncture stereotypes along the way. There’s a surprise on nearly every page. When we meet Mary Agee, who gained brief and unwanted fame some years ago as the female executive whose romantic involvement with the CEO led to chaos at Bendix Corp., we don’t read some Oprah story of how she has personally grown from the experience. What Mary Agee does these days is not about Mary Agee; it’s about making a difference in the lives of troubled women. Productively, without fanfare and without taking sides in the abortion debate, the foundation she runs helps women cope with unexpected pregnancies.

Wymard vividly sketches the turning points in many of these women’s lives. In one portrait, for instance, we see successful ad exec Kip Tiernan stopped dead in her tracks in a church aisle, suddenly uttering Holy something (not a word one says in church): It’s not a prayer; it’s an epiphany, after which she is destined to spend the rest of her life as a gadfly activist on behalf of Boston’s homeless.

The author also offers trenchant insights on how women run organizations. One female CEO tells Wymard she wishes she could be tougher on some employees, but senses that she is expected to have a more collaborative style of management because of her gender. People think I’m nice, this executive says, and I’m not sure that’s true. They don’t give me any choice! Kathleen Neville’s Internal Affairs: The Abuse of Power, Sexual Harassment, and Hypocrisy in the Workplace (McGraw-Hill, $24.95, 0071342567) takes us to a darker corner of the working world. It’s a little hard to believe that a book like this needed to be written, almost a decade after the nationwide sexual-harassment-sensitivity stand-down brought on by the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. Yet here we are on the cusp of a new millennium, and women can’t be assured they won’t be accosted by a creep while they work. Nor that the creep won’t be the boss.

Neville, an educator, arbitrator, and expert on sexual harassment, has spent a lot of time getting inside the heads of victims, harassers, corporate officials, and others affected by harassment cases. Her horror stories of actual cases drive home a point that won’t be lost on senior managers who think it can’t happen in my shop it can happen, no matter how much camaraderie your employees seem to enjoy, no matter how upstanding a guy your scoutmaster-father-of-three-EVP-for-marketing may seem to be, no matter what boilerplate language you have put in your employee handbook about your supposedly zero-tolerance policy on workplace harassment.

Equally valuable are the detailed composite scenarios that Neville presents in order to explain the varying moral and social perspectives that come into play in harassment cases. The book is like a series of role-playing exercises, inviting readers to see things, just briefly, from the point of view of the board of directors (who may consider it more cost-effective to pay off claims than to lose a valued top exec); the competing lawyers (who tend to spring unwelcome surprises on both adversaries and clients in the course of the settlement process); the victim (often tormented by self-doubt about the incidents); and the harasser (who may be a calculating predator in the corner office or may be Lennie from the mail room, who figures the girls upstairs appreciate being told they’re kinda hot).

In these scenarios, the author does not address the possibility of false harassment claims by vindictive employees. (It would be interesting to know whether that omission reflects a partisan stance on her part or the fact that, in her experience, such claims simply don’t happen.) Still, Neville sheds light where there has mostly been heat in the past, moving beyond battle-of-the-sexes polemics to convey real understanding about how sexual harassment happens and how companies can prevent it. Internal Affairs is a comprehensive and eye-opening primer on a subject that today’s corporate honchos wish away at their peril.

Enough about women at work what’s a lady to do with her hard-earned dough? For starters, don’t let some piggish man get his mitts on it. Heidi Evans offers that advice in How to Hide Money from Your Husband . . . and Other Time-Honored Ways to Build a Nest Egg: The Best Kept Secret of a Good Marriage. This is an unabashedly one-sided book. Evans says men are past masters at hiding money from women, whether the purpose is to finance secret affairs or to keep a wife from getting part of the marital estate in a divorce. It’s high time, she argues, that women play the same game.

More intriguingly, Evans finds that women have been hiding money from their husbands since time immemorial. A more than adequate amateur anthropologist, she delves into the unrecorded history of women’s home lives, uncovering stories of women who spent lifetimes building secret, five-figure nest eggs. Some wives do it to protect themselves in shaky marriages. Others do it to protect the feckless men they love from their own bad habits.

The book presents plenty of cautionary tales about women who trusted their cheating husbands too much or too long, until divorce brought financial ruin. There are stories of depressingly mercenary men as well as women. But the most interesting relationships chronicled here are the ones in which a little financial secrecy really has been the key to a strong marriage, enabling the woman to feel a measure of control over her life and providing a slush fund from which the whole family benefits. How to Hide Money is an eye-opening look at how money and power are intertwined in a marriage, and how women can hold onto their share of both.

Briefly noted: Even in today’s booming economy, shocking numbers of Americans still carry crippling credit-card balances and other installment debts that can leave them feeling financially trapped. Slash Your Debt: Save Money and Secure Your Future (Financial Literacy Center, $10.95, 0965963837), by debt counselor Gerri Detweiler and writers Marc Eisenson and Nancy Castleman, offers a concise and understandable roadmap for getting out of the money pit.

In Generations at Work: Managing the Clash of Veterans, Boomers, Xers, and Nexters in Your Workplace (Amacom, $25, 0814404804), authors Ron Zemke, Claire Raines, and Bob Filipczak address the conflicting generational values to be found in any large group of employees. And they look to the future, predicting that today’s adolescent Nexters will come full circle, tending to share more values in common with their 60-to-80-year-old Veteran elders than with any social cohorts in-between.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

In How to Be a Star at Work, productivity consultant and college professor Robert E. Kelley draws on experience he gathered working with such large companies as AT&andT’s Bell Labs and Hewlett-Packard. Summarizing his search for the holy grail of what makes a standout employee, he offers a nine-step program of strategies. This “how-to” aspect is suffused with the rigor of first-hand knowledge and academic research, adding to the credibility of his suggestions. Kelley’s target is the elite of the new knowledge-based economy (he calls them “brainpowered” workers). They are college-educated engineers, analysts, and the like. His program is not remedial. Instead, he attempts to convey what separates the merely good or average, but certainly acceptable performers, from the “stars.” If you buy into the premise that “stars” are many more times productive than average workers, and that our economy is increasingly a knowledge-based one, it behooves us to make as many people as possible into “stars.” That’s because productivity gains are what drive real increases in our standard of living.

To unfairly boil down Kelley’s recipe for workplace stardom, start with top-notch technical skills in your chosen field of endeavor and add a flexible and secure ego and superior people skills. This is not a one-size-fits-all formula, but a well-researched and cleanly written treatise. Of particular interest are chapters on the need to employ creative “followership” and the advantages of “small-l leadership,” the latter particularly well suited for teams brought together to address a particular issue. Another telling note is that star employees don’t typically see their “brainpowered” roles as subordinate to or less important than the jobs of managers just different.

Reviewed by Neal Lipschutz.

Cashing in, cashing out Lately it seems as though all my friends are either getting rich or grousing about not getting rich while everyone else is. With the stock market and the overall economy steaming through yet another year of almost obscene prosperity, many Americans are rolling in the dough while others try to figure out how to get a taste of it.

There are new books out for both sorts of people: those who want to make the best of the money they have, and those still struggling to build up a nest egg. This month’s featured books cover how to start investing in the future, how to pick hot stocks, which hot stocks to pick, and what to do with all that moolah after retirement.

Let’s start simply. In Wealth Happens One Day at a Time: 365 Days to a Brighter Financial Future (HarperBusiness, $19.95, 0887309828), Brooke M. Stephens offers a combination of advice, affirmations, and action to demystify the process of reaching financial security. Like Dave Ramsey and other authors who address the basics of creating personal wealth, Stephens tells readers they can gain greater control over their lives by getting control of money.

It’s only natural for some people to feel intimidated about all the flashy wealth on display these days. This book is a self-help course in overcoming financial intimidation. One day at a time, it will help readers master the concepts of saving and investing even as they master their own emotions about money. Its 365 mini-essays move from the simplest of topics to such complex issues as Roth IRAs and testamentary trusts all explained in a breezy style with plenty of enlightening anecdotes.

Wealth Happens is a valuable road-map to personal enrichment. If you or people you care about have been meaning to get control of finances but just haven’t figured out where to start this book may be the highest-yielding investment you ever make.

Graduates of Stephens’s tutorial in personal financial management can move on to the small time with Gene Walden’s The 100 Best Stocks to Own for Under $20 (Dearborn, $19.95, 0887309828). Not every stock on Walden’s list is a small company, but most are small enough to have stayed off the radar screens of Wall Street know-it-alls in recent years. The author has applied sophisticated technical analysis to screen through the more than 8,000 stocks trading at more than $20 a share, finding a final 100 that excelled by a broad range of performance measures.

Imagine the rewards that can come from taking risks. Somewhere out there is the next Microsoft, priced today as cheaply as Bill Gates’s fledgling company was in 1987. A $10,000 investment then would be worth $1 million now. Walden argues convincingly that small stocks have been the 20th century’s most lucrative form of investment, and he makes a compelling case that his 100 picks are the hottest performers in this hot category. At a time when the true value of many high-flying stocks is very much open to question, Walden’s research can help investors find the market’s hidden gems.

Global Bargain Hunting: The Investor’s Guide to Profits in Emerging Markets (Touchstone/Simon ∧ Schuster, $14, 068484808) traces another route to riches for intrepid investors. It’s true that the Asian financial crisis gave all emerging markets a bad name in 1998, soon after the first edition of this book came out, but the turmoil did nothing to shake the faith of authors Burton Malkiel and J.P. Mei in the less-developed world’s markets. Their new paperback edition incorporates the wisdom gained from the Asian experience and points stock-buyers toward the opportunities that abound in its wake.

Unlike Walden, Malkiel and Mei focus more on how to pick the right international stocks than on which stocks to pick. They devote plenty of attention to the pitfalls of investing in emerging markets, which range from high transaction costs to underdeveloped stock markets to corruption and even the risk of government expropriation. And they discuss which types of investment are and are not suitable for the typical individual buyer.

Like Walden, Global Bargain Hunting’s authors crunch numbers to reveal true values in the market that most investors could never discover on their own. You don’t have to be a math wizard to be persuaded by their valuation formulas, such as a calculation of domestic-growth-to-price/earnings ratios in ten nations that ranks the U.S., with its overheated stock market, dead last in investment values and Poland first. The message: Sell apple pie short; go long on kielbasa.

Malkiel and Mei explain complicated financial concepts in simple and clear language. They are admirably blunt about some of the dirty secrets of Wall Street, offering such insider warnings as: Initial public offerings of closed-end [mutual fund] shares are usually a rip-off. And, as Malkiel advocated (controversially at the time) in 1973’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street (6th edition 1996, W.W. Norton, $15.95, 0393315290), the authors tend to favor indexed funds over managed funds for international investors.

Global Bargain Hunting makes a strong case for buying into the developing world, even with all the financial hazards involved. Investors wary of buying at the top of the U.S. market will find this book a worthwhile form of armchair traveling.

So, suppose you profit from the advice of all three of these authors. Enjoy the warm, fuzzy feeling of success while you can, because what comes after it is the realization that you really have something to lose now. Margaret A. Malaspina wants to help you cope with your riches. Don’t Die Broke: How to Turn Your Retirement Savings Into Lasting Income (Bloomberg Press, $21.95, 1576600688) is Malaspina’s guide to a topic that Baby Boomers and others may not have thought about much as they squirreled away savings in 401(k) and IRA plans over the years: managing those accumulated, and often half-forgotten, assets before and during retirement.

Malaspina, who helped make fund manager Peter Lynch a superstar when she was a communications executive with Fidelity Investments, displays a thorough grasp of the wickedly arcane rules that govern retirement savings, especially when it comes time to start withdrawing them. Just as importantly, she finds ways to help ordinary readers understand those rules and what can happen when retirees inadvertently break them. The horror stories here, about incredibly damaging financial decisions made by smart people acting in good faith, will suffice to focus the minds of future retirees on what they have at stake.

Don’t Die Broke is not just for people approaching retirement age, either. Anyone, of any age, who inherits retirement-plan assets may face a bewildering series of choices, with little guidance from the IRS or the trustee holding the assets. Your heirs may wish you had died broke before it’s all over and, in fact, Malaspina contradicts her book’s title by offering sage advice on how to do just that. Effective estate planning, which may need to begin sooner in life than many would think, can shift enough assets out of an estate to avoid large tax burdens.

Malaspina’s work is important reading for any American who is saving for the future, because it hammers home the uncomfortable fact that just saving money is not enough. Every retirement account needs a game plan as well, and Don’t Die Broke will empower its readers to create solid strategies.

Briefly noted: Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen, by Charles R. Morris, is a salutary reminder, in these heady times, of what can go wrong in the financial markets. Morris deftly surveys America’s two-century history of occasional busts, panics, and market hiccups, skewering the hubris almost always at the core of a financial disaster. In Succeeding Generations: Realizing the Dream of Families in Business (Harvard Business School Press, $35, 0875847420), Ivan Lansberg offers insightful case studies and astute analysis to guide parents, siblings, and other relatives through the tricky business of succession planning in a family company.

One of this month’s most intriguing works (remember, intrigue can have more than one meaning) is a former U.S. military spy’s primer on corporate espionage. Confidential: Uncover Your Competitor’s Secrets Legally and Quickly and Protect Your Own (HarperBusiness, $26, 006661984X), by John Nolan, provides chilling glimpses into the cloak-and-dagger world of finding out (and protecting) companies’ most valuable secrets.

And finally, aspiring tycoons can choose from among 50 potential role models in Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders (Doubleday, $24.95, 0385493436 on sale August 17). Authors Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin, both executive search specialists, have finely honed their instincts for finding good leaders, and their chosen honchos sound off on life at the top in revealing interviews.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

Cashing in, cashing out Lately it seems as though all my friends are either getting rich or grousing about not getting rich while everyone else is. With the stock market and the overall economy steaming through yet another year of almost obscene prosperity, many Americans are rolling in the dough while others try to figure out how to get a taste of it.

There are new books out for both sorts of people: those who want to make the best of the money they have, and those still struggling to build up a nest egg. This month’s featured books cover how to start investing in the future, how to pick hot stocks, which hot stocks to pick, and what to do with all that moolah after retirement.

Let’s start simply. In Wealth Happens One Day at a Time: 365 Days to a Brighter Financial Future (HarperBusiness, $19.95, 0887309828), Brooke M. Stephens offers a combination of advice, affirmations, and action to demystify the process of reaching financial security. Like Dave Ramsey and other authors who address the basics of creating personal wealth, Stephens tells readers they can gain greater control over their lives by getting control of money.

It’s only natural for some people to feel intimidated about all the flashy wealth on display these days. This book is a self-help course in overcoming financial intimidation. One day at a time, it will help readers master the concepts of saving and investing even as they master their own emotions about money. Its 365 mini-essays move from the simplest of topics to such complex issues as Roth IRAs and testamentary trusts all explained in a breezy style with plenty of enlightening anecdotes.

Wealth Happens is a valuable road-map to personal enrichment. If you or people you care about have been meaning to get control of finances but just haven’t figured out where to start this book may be the highest-yielding investment you ever make.

Graduates of Stephens’s tutorial in personal financial management can move on to the small time with Gene Walden’s The 100 Best Stocks to Own for Under $20 (Dearborn, $19.95, 0887309828). Not every stock on Walden’s list is a small company, but most are small enough to have stayed off the radar screens of Wall Street know-it-alls in recent years. The author has applied sophisticated technical analysis to screen through the more than 8,000 stocks trading at more than $20 a share, finding a final 100 that excelled by a broad range of performance measures.

Imagine the rewards that can come from taking risks. Somewhere out there is the next Microsoft, priced today as cheaply as Bill Gates’s fledgling company was in 1987. A $10,000 investment then would be worth $1 million now. Walden argues convincingly that small stocks have been the 20th century’s most lucrative form of investment, and he makes a compelling case that his 100 picks are the hottest performers in this hot category. At a time when the true value of many high-flying stocks is very much open to question, Walden’s research can help investors find the market’s hidden gems.

Global Bargain Hunting: The Investor’s Guide to Profits in Emerging Markets (Touchstone/Simon &and Schuster, $14, 068484808) traces another route to riches for intrepid investors. It’s true that the Asian financial crisis gave all emerging markets a bad name in 1998, soon after the first edition of this book came out, but the turmoil did nothing to shake the faith of authors Burton Malkiel and J.P. Mei in the less-developed world’s markets. Their new paperback edition incorporates the wisdom gained from the Asian experience and points stock-buyers toward the opportunities that abound in its wake.

Unlike Walden, Malkiel and Mei focus more on how to pick the right international stocks than on which stocks to pick. They devote plenty of attention to the pitfalls of investing in emerging markets, which range from high transaction costs to underdeveloped stock markets to corruption and even the risk of government expropriation. And they discuss which types of investment are and are not suitable for the typical individual buyer.

Like Walden, Global Bargain Hunting’s authors crunch numbers to reveal true values in the market that most investors could never discover on their own. You don’t have to be a math wizard to be persuaded by their valuation formulas, such as a calculation of domestic-growth-to-price/earnings ratios in ten nations that ranks the U.S., with its overheated stock market, dead last in investment values and Poland first. The message: Sell apple pie short; go long on kielbasa.

Malkiel and Mei explain complicated financial concepts in simple and clear language. They are admirably blunt about some of the dirty secrets of Wall Street, offering such insider warnings as: Initial public offerings of closed-end [mutual fund] shares are usually a rip-off. And, as Malkiel advocated (controversially at the time) in 1973’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street (6th edition 1996, W.W. Norton, $15.95, 0393315290), the authors tend to favor indexed funds over managed funds for international investors.

Global Bargain Hunting makes a strong case for buying into the developing world, even with all the financial hazards involved. Investors wary of buying at the top of the U.S. market will find this book a worthwhile form of armchair traveling.

So, suppose you profit from the advice of all three of these authors. Enjoy the warm, fuzzy feeling of success while you can, because what comes after it is the realization that you really have something to lose now. Margaret A. Malaspina wants to help you cope with your riches. Don’t Die Broke: How to Turn Your Retirement Savings Into Lasting Income is Malaspina’s guide to a topic that Baby Boomers and others may not have thought about much as they squirreled away savings in 401(k) and IRA plans over the years: managing those accumulated, and often half-forgotten, assets before and during retirement.

Malaspina, who helped make fund manager Peter Lynch a superstar when she was a communications executive with Fidelity Investments, displays a thorough grasp of the wickedly arcane rules that govern retirement savings, especially when it comes time to start withdrawing them. Just as importantly, she finds ways to help ordinary readers understand those rules and what can happen when retirees inadvertently break them. The horror stories here, about incredibly damaging financial decisions made by smart people acting in good faith, will suffice to focus the minds of future retirees on what they have at stake.

Don’t Die Broke is not just for people approaching retirement age, either. Anyone, of any age, who inherits retirement-plan assets may face a bewildering series of choices, with little guidance from the IRS or the trustee holding the assets. Your heirs may wish you had died broke before it’s all over and, in fact, Malaspina contradicts her book’s title by offering sage advice on how to do just that. Effective estate planning, which may need to begin sooner in life than many would think, can shift enough assets out of an estate to avoid large tax burdens.

Malaspina’s work is important reading for any American who is saving for the future, because it hammers home the uncomfortable fact that just saving money is not enough. Every retirement account needs a game plan as well, and Don’t Die Broke will empower its readers to create solid strategies.

Briefly noted: Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen, by Charles R. Morris (Times Books, $25, 0812931734), is a salutary reminder, in these heady times, of what can go wrong in the financial markets. Morris deftly surveys America’s two-century history of occasional busts, panics, and market hiccups, skewering the hubris almost always at the core of a financial disaster. In Succeeding Generations: Realizing the Dream of Families in Business (Harvard Business School Press, $35, 0875847420), Ivan Lansberg offers insightful case studies and astute analysis to guide parents, siblings, and other relatives through the tricky business of succession planning in a family company.

One of this month’s most intriguing works (remember, intrigue can have more than one meaning) is a former U.S. military spy’s primer on corporate espionage. Confidential: Uncover Your Competitor’s Secrets Legally and Quickly and Protect Your Own (HarperBusiness, $26, 006661984X), by John Nolan, provides chilling glimpses into the cloak-and-dagger world of finding out (and protecting) companies’ most valuable secrets.

And finally, aspiring tycoons can choose from among 50 potential role models in Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders (Doubleday, $24.95, 0385493436 on sale August 17). Authors Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin, both executive search specialists, have finely honed their instincts for finding good leaders, and their chosen honchos sound off on life at the top in revealing interviews.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

Cashing in, cashing out Lately it seems as though all my friends are either getting rich or grousing about not getting rich while everyone else is. With the stock market and the overall economy steaming through yet another year of almost obscene prosperity, many Americans are rolling in the dough while others try to figure out how to get a taste of it.

There are new books out for both sorts of people: those who want to make the best of the money they have, and those still struggling to build up a nest egg. This month’s featured books cover how to start investing in the future, how to pick hot stocks, which hot stocks to pick, and what to do with all that moolah after retirement.

Let’s start simply. In Wealth Happens One Day at a Time: 365 Days to a Brighter Financial Future (HarperBusiness, $19.95, 0887309828), Brooke M. Stephens offers a combination of advice, affirmations, and action to demystify the process of reaching financial security. Like Dave Ramsey and other authors who address the basics of creating personal wealth, Stephens tells readers they can gain greater control over their lives by getting control of money.

It’s only natural for some people to feel intimidated about all the flashy wealth on display these days. This book is a self-help course in overcoming financial intimidation. One day at a time, it will help readers master the concepts of saving and investing even as they master their own emotions about money. Its 365 mini-essays move from the simplest of topics to such complex issues as Roth IRAs and testamentary trusts all explained in a breezy style with plenty of enlightening anecdotes.

Wealth Happens is a valuable road-map to personal enrichment. If you or people you care about have been meaning to get control of finances but just haven’t figured out where to start this book may be the highest-yielding investment you ever make.

Graduates of Stephens’s tutorial in personal financial management can move on to the small time with Gene Walden’s The 100 Best Stocks to Own for Under $20. Not every stock on Walden’s list is a small company, but most are small enough to have stayed off the radar screens of Wall Street know-it-alls in recent years. The author has applied sophisticated technical analysis to screen through the more than 8,000 stocks trading at more than $20 a share, finding a final 100 that excelled by a broad range of performance measures.

Imagine the rewards that can come from taking risks. Somewhere out there is the next Microsoft, priced today as cheaply as Bill Gates’s fledgling company was in 1987. A $10,000 investment then would be worth $1 million now. Walden argues convincingly that small stocks have been the 20th century’s most lucrative form of investment, and he makes a compelling case that his 100 picks are the hottest performers in this hot category. At a time when the true value of many high-flying stocks is very much open to question, Walden’s research can help investors find the market’s hidden gems.

Global Bargain Hunting: The Investor’s Guide to Profits in Emerging Markets (Touchstone/Simon ∧ Schuster, $14, 068484808) traces another route to riches for intrepid investors. It’s true that the Asian financial crisis gave all emerging markets a bad name in 1998, soon after the first edition of this book came out, but the turmoil did nothing to shake the faith of authors Burton Malkiel and J.P. Mei in the less-developed world’s markets. Their new paperback edition incorporates the wisdom gained from the Asian experience and points stock-buyers toward the opportunities that abound in its wake.

Unlike Walden, Malkiel and Mei focus more on how to pick the right international stocks than on which stocks to pick. They devote plenty of attention to the pitfalls of investing in emerging markets, which range from high transaction costs to underdeveloped stock markets to corruption and even the risk of government expropriation. And they discuss which types of investment are and are not suitable for the typical individual buyer.

Like Walden, Global Bargain Hunting’s authors crunch numbers to reveal true values in the market that most investors could never discover on their own. You don’t have to be a math wizard to be persuaded by their valuation formulas, such as a calculation of domestic-growth-to-price/earnings ratios in ten nations that ranks the U.S., with its overheated stock market, dead last in investment values and Poland first. The message: Sell apple pie short; go long on kielbasa.

Malkiel and Mei explain complicated financial concepts in simple and clear language. They are admirably blunt about some of the dirty secrets of Wall Street, offering such insider warnings as: Initial public offerings of closed-end [mutual fund] shares are usually a rip-off. And, as Malkiel advocated (controversially at the time) in 1973’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street (6th edition 1996, W.

W. Norton, $15.95, 0393315290), the authors tend to favor indexed funds over managed funds for international investors.

Global Bargain Hunting makes a strong case for buying into the developing world, even with all the financial hazards involved. Investors wary of buying at the top of the U.S. market will find this book a worthwhile form of armchair traveling.

So, suppose you profit from the advice of all three of these authors. Enjoy the warm, fuzzy feeling of success while you can, because what comes after it is the realization that you really have something to lose now. Margaret A. Malaspina wants to help you cope with your riches. Don’t Die Broke: How to Turn Your Retirement Savings Into Lasting Income (Bloomberg Press, $21.95, 1576600688) is Malaspina’s guide to a topic that Baby Boomers and others may not have thought about much as they squirreled away savings in 401(k) and IRA plans over the years: managing those accumulated, and often half-forgotten, assets before and during retirement.

Malaspina, who helped make fund manager Peter Lynch a superstar when she was a communications executive with Fidelity Investments, displays a thorough grasp of the wickedly arcane rules that govern retirement savings, especially when it comes time to start withdrawing them. Just as importantly, she finds ways to help ordinary readers understand those rules and what can happen when retirees inadvertently break them. The horror stories here, about incredibly damaging financial decisions made by smart people acting in good faith, will suffice to focus the minds of future retirees on what they have at stake.

Don’t Die Broke is not just for people approaching retirement age, either. Anyone, of any age, who inherits retirement-plan assets may face a bewildering series of choices, with little guidance from the IRS or the trustee holding the assets. Your heirs may wish you had died broke before it’s all over and, in fact, Malaspina contradicts her book’s title by offering sage advice on how to do just that. Effective estate planning, which may need to begin sooner in life than many would think, can shift enough assets out of an estate to avoid large tax burdens.

Malaspina’s work is important reading for any American who is saving for the future, because it hammers home the uncomfortable fact that just saving money is not enough. Every retirement account needs a game plan as well, and Don’t Die Broke will empower its readers to create solid strategies.

Briefly noted: Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen, by Charles R. Morris (Times Books, $25, 0812931734), is a salutary reminder, in these heady times, of what can go wrong in the financial markets. Morris deftly surveys America’s two-century history of occasional busts, panics, and market hiccups, skewering the hubris almost always at the core of a financial disaster. In Succeeding Generations: Realizing the Dream of Families in Business (Harvard Business School Press, $35, 0875847420), Ivan Lansberg offers insightful case studies and astute analysis to guide parents, siblings, and other relatives through the tricky business of succession planning in a family company.

One of this month’s most intriguing works (remember, intrigue can have more than one meaning) is a former U.S. military spy’s primer on corporate espionage. Confidential: Uncover Your Competitor’s Secrets Legally and Quickly and Protect Your Own (HarperBusiness, $26, 006661984X), by John Nolan, provides chilling glimpses into the cloak-and-dagger world of finding out (and protecting) companies’ most valuable secrets.

And finally, aspiring tycoons can choose from among 50 potential role models in Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders (Doubleday, $24.95, 0385493436 on sale August 17). Authors Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin, both executive search specialists, have finely honed their instincts for finding good leaders, and their chosen honchos sound off on life at the top in revealing interviews.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

E’s a mystery Picture yourself hanging ten in the famed surf of Hawaii, enjoying a day of better-than-average waves, just having a totally tubular time. Now, imagine that the reason for the high surf is an incoming tropical storm and you missed the forecast this morning.

If that scenario seems gnawingly familiar, you’re probably one of millions of people all over this Web-woven world trying to make sense of the Internet’s impact on how we do business. For many, using the World Wide Web is not about carefree surfing any more. It’s about survival in an increasingly merciless electronic commerce (or e-commerce ) marketplace.

Our featured new books this month deal with the anxiety that corporate managers, employees, and entrepreneurs are all feeling as they come to terms with the necessity of mastering e-commerce and other online competencies. At enterprises of all sizes in all industries, hallways are abuzz with nervous conversations about the huge opportunities waiting to be exploited on the Web and about the harsh blows that competition will deal to those who fail to exploit it properly.

It’s inevitable that books about Web business would abound while it’s a hot topic. But one new title stands out as the most lucidly argued of any I have seen, with the broadest relevance to a wide range of business situations: Dead Ahead: The Web Dilemma and the New Rules of Business (Allworth Press, $24.95, 1581150334), by Laurie Windham with Jon Samsel.

This is a book about real life, at a time when businesses are being forced into making high-stakes commitments to an evolving paradigm. I know from firsthand experience how baffling, frustrating, and even frightening it can be to decide how and where a company will make its early Web investments. It’s easy to tell that the rules of business are indeed new, but it can be vexing to figure out how they apply in one’s own case.

Windham, a San Francisco consultant, cuts to the core issues that business strategists need to focus on after they get past the initial acceptance of the Web as an inevitable part of their future. Windham guides the reader toward an understanding of how the Web reshapes nearly every aspect of business, from management structure to the most basic marketing premises to the new ways companies must approach their capital needs in the wired world and beyond. Dead Ahead is a first-rate prop to bolster the confidence of reluctant cybernauts.

Jonathan Ezor takes on many of the same issues in Clicking Through: A Survival Guide for Bringing Your Company Online (Bloomberg Press, $19.95, 1576600734). Offering an attorney’s perspective but also an entrepreneur’s mind-set, lawyer and columnist Ezor sets out a primer to help small businesses cope with the dangers inherent in Web-based business.

Those risks, as he makes clear, are both legal and tactical. It’s as easy to infringe someone else’s copyright inadvertently online as it is for someone else to poach your own. There’s a world’s worth of law and regulation that even a well-meaning Web site can transgress. Questions can arise about just who owns the material your company pays Web developers to create. The devil lurks in the details of contracts with technology vendors such as Web hosts, and the other party to the contract may be the only one with a full knowledge of those details. Ezor provides sound counsel on what questions to ask and what points really matter in negotiating with all the parties involved in weaving a Web presence.

Clicking Through is about opportunity as well as risk. But its warnings and suggestions concerning the things that can go wrong in e-business are sobering words of wisdom for companies about to fly enthusiastically into the enticing Web. This book will empower businesses to manage their online risks intelligently so that they can pursue online opportunities without fear of the unknown.

In The E-Commerce Book: Building the E-Empire (Academic Press, $39.95, 0124211607), authors Steffano Korper and Juanita Ellis convey a deep understanding of Internet applications in business. That’s hardly a surprise, since these information technology experts and educators have been working at the cutting edge of online business since the very Stone Age of the World Wide Web way back in 1994.

Would-be e-emperors will find this guide to empire-building as comprehensive as they could possibly hope for and will find plenty of inspiration as well. Lest anyone doubt the vigor of the Web marketplace, the authors sketch out its potential in terms that will convert all doubters. Maybe the figure of $2.2 trillion in worldwide e-commerce activity by 2003 is just too large to digest, so let’s look at some smaller numbers from the book. Number of years it took for use of the automobile to spread to one quarter of the population: 55. For the telephone: 35 years. For the Internet: 7 years. Message delivered: This new medium is catching on at lightning speed, and if your company doesn’t reach its customers through the Web, your competitors will.

Korper and Ellis approach e-commerce from a technologist’s point of view though, as the books mentioned above make clear, online business makes techies of everyone in the office, stripping the old high priests from the MIS department of much of their mystical power, but also leaving behind anyone who fails to master the basics of Internet technologies. It’s fortunate that these writers have a gift for gently acquainting the intimidated novice with the rapidly evolving tech phenomena that may well shape his or her future, from XML language to EDI connectivity to asymmetric key encryption.

Despite its attention to high-tech topics, The E-Commerce Book is a big-picture view of the Web’s brave new world. For any business leader trying to get e-commerce right the first time, this title will be an indispensable resource.

Our fourth book doesn’t present itself as another work about the Internet, but the very fact that Web applications are so central to its strategic vision makes it an important volume for business people coming to grips with the new online economy. Steven Wheeler and Evan Hirsch, authors of Channel Champions: How Leading Companies Build New Strategies to Serve Customers (Jossey-Bass, $35, 0787950343), are consultants with Booz-Allen and Hamilton, who cast a laser focus on one of the ultimate goals of all business efforts, online and otherwise: building a connection with the people who buy a company’s products and services.

Channel Champions is the book to pick up in the quiet moments of the morning before you boot up and begin your hectic online business day. Its core premise is refreshingly simple: Good businesses build good channels and tend them with loving care. A channel is simply a means of reaching the customer. Channels, Wheeler and Hirsch argue, have always been with us; a 5-and-10 store is (or was) one form of channel, a big-box superstore is another, and a virtual store that exists only online is another.

Obviously, channels are changing these days. Unintended consequences can result. Channels that worked for the decade preceding last Thursday may not work come Tuesday. The Web channel can fail to reach key customers, and it can eat into traditional sales channels. The authors guide the reader through these shoals by showing how the world’s best companies have channeled successfully how Wilsonart built a distributor network that delivers on its promise to deliver kitchen counters within ten days to anywhere in the U.S., how Saturn sells a transportation service to beat out rivals who just sell cars, how Dell dominates personal computer sales by selling directly to customers.

Briefly noted: Michael Lewis, of Liar’s Poker fame, has written the most engaging and dramatic business book of the year: The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (W.

W. Norton, $25.95, 0393048136; Nova Audio Books, $17.95, 1567408567). Lewis plays Boswell to one of the wild sages of our era, Netscape founder Jim Clark, intrepidly riding along as the entrepreneur tries to launch a health care technology company and the world’s most computerized yacht simultaneously.

U.C.L.A. Professor Richard Rosecrance surveys the increasingly integrated global economy in The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Century. Rosecrance draws analogies from the experiences of great and lesser national powers, going back hundreds of years to buttress his argument that we are literally on the verge of entering a new world: a universe where traditional measures of national might have no meaning and where a country’s most valuable resources are often the least tangible ones.

The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise (Jossey-Bass, $28.50, 078794324X) presents a radical new management theory, set out in essays by editor John H. Clippinger and nine other contributors. Borrowing principles from scientific thinking, the authors postulate a thought-provoking new approach to running organizations as complex adaptive systems. Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture products.

E’s a mystery Picture yourself hanging ten in the famed surf of Hawaii, enjoying a day of better-than-average waves, just having a totally tubular time. Now, imagine that the reason for the high surf is an incoming tropical storm and you missed the forecast this morning.

Management and Murphy’s Law Anyone who has ever read Paradise Lost knows that things gone wrong make for catchier story lines than things going right. That’s why Milton’s Satan is a more memorable character than any of the good guys in his epic. Four of this month’s notable business books offer entertaining and edifying stories of failure and, in the process, they triumph over Milton’s malady and offer roadmaps to success.

In When Giants Stumble (Prentice Hall, $26, 0735200599), business historian Robert Sobel reviews the past century in American business to bring us the sad stories of companies long forgotten (discount retailer E.J. Korvette, auto maker Kaiser-Frazer and others), and of institutions that have been wounded but are still with us (the New York Stock Exchange, Schlitz and Pabst beers).

Sobel categorizes the giant blunders of these titans into a list of 15 deadly sins of corporate leadership. They range from the Blunders of Hubris, Ignorance, Nepotism, and Nonstrategic Expansion to the Blunders of Cutting Corners, Standing Pat, Isolation, and Dependency.

The author has a gift for teasing out lessons from disasters that might otherwise seem like ancient history. From pioneering Osborne Computer Corp., we learn that a company can get it all right predicting accurately that IBM-compatibility and laptop portability would become desirable features in PCs and still get it all wrong. Osborne built bug-ridden products, alienated strategic partners such as distributors, and died unmourned in 1982, before the PC revolution had taken off. The Blunder of Ineptitude, Sobel calls it.

And from Packard Motor Car Co., we learn that squandering the intangible value of a brand name can kill even a long-established company. In 1928 there was nothing on the road more stylish and status-laden than a Packard. By 1948, after misguided efforts to sell more cars to the masses, Packard was just another mid-range make, and by 1958 the company was history. Sobel labels this error the Blunder of Downward Brand Extension.

It’s impossible not to feel for these stumbling giants. Visionary entrepreneurs like James Ling of LTV Corp. and industrial dynasties like the Schwinn family of bicycle makers may have nobody to blame but themselves for what happened to their enterprises, but there is still a tragic dimension to the amount of heart and soul invested in ultimate failure.

Sobel writes with empathy for the blunderers. He could have turned out an interesting but facile book by merely narrating what went wrong at these companies. Instead he has produced a truly valuable study by analyzing why each lousy decision seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

A question you’ll keep asking yourself as you read Sobel’s book serves as the title for a volume from product development expert Robert M. McMath What Were They Thinking? Money-Saving, Time-Saving, Face-Saving Lessons You Can Learn from Products That Flopped, just released in paperback. McMath distills his four decades of new-product observations into a textbook on bad ideas. The Milton principle holds true once more: McMath’s vivid prose brings marketing failures to life as though they were characters in a novel.

If you had the misfortune of oily hair, would you advertise that fact in the supermarket by purchasing Gillette’s For Oily Hair Only shampoo? Have you felt the need lately to buy a 48-ounce jug of Maxwell House Brewed Coffee, so you can just pour a cup and microwave it? These what-were-they-thinking hall-of-famers have taken their places in the gallery of dead products that McMath has been collecting for nearly 30 years. He has 80,000 now, and the collection keeps growing as more than 25,000 new consumable items hit the shelves in the U.S. every year most doomed to quick extinction.

Like Sobel, though, McMath is not content merely to chronicle failure. His book is full of nuggets of wisdom. He shows us, for instance, that an errant concept is not always a dead end. What was Kimberly-Clark thinking when it saw Kleenex’s main purpose as removing cold cream? No telling, but give the company credit for shifting its marketing plans when consumers decided to use Kleenex as disposable hankies. With instructive examples like these and opinionated but astute analysis, McMath has produced a marketing bible likely to enjoy a long shelf life.

What were they thinking when they gave such a cumbersome title to one of the year’s most memorable business books? If You Want to Make God Really Laugh, Show Him Your Business Plan (Amacom, $22.95, 0814404987) is a combination of stand-up comedy and dead-serious business sense from former Burger King CEO Barry J. Gibbons. Get past the title, and you’re in for the funniest biz read since Jerry Della Femina’s From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor (Simon &and Schuster, 1970, out of print).

Interspersed with the author’s zany asides are his 101 Universal Laws of Business, a set of precepts illustrated by episodes from a career spent managing large operations on both sides of the Atlantic and watching business plan scenarios turn to dust. Both the humor and the rules project an insider tone, as though Gibbons were addressing a closed-door gathering of fellow corporate chieftains on a golfing retreat. Gibbons is frank about his own failures as a manager.

He has clearly learned from those shortcomings, developing a refreshingly humane vision of management in the process. Imagine if his universal law of motivation caught on nationwide: Pay people till their eyes water, share with them the value they add, trust them, and avoid doing dumb things that demotivate them. Plenty of bosses would view such notions as heresy. That’s why there’s still so much misery today in our supposedly enlightened workplaces.

For a guy who admits to being rich and satisfied with himself, Barry Gibbons displays a surprising humility in this book. I don’t think he would claim it as a virtue to be humble about leading an organization; I think he’d say it’s a necessity, given the certainty that the CEO will embarrass himself or herself at some point. And when that moment comes, he or she had better be able to laugh about it.

In Right from the Start: Taking Charge in a New Leadership Role (Harvard Business School Press, $24.95, 0875847501), consultant Dan Ciampa and Harvard professor Michael Watkins have plenty to say about what can go wrong from the start. They, too, are doing a Milton, focusing the minds of aspiring executive readers by presenting examples of disasters in the careers of people just like them.

People don’t often talk on the record about why they got fired. But they do in this book (anonymously), as do many who have endured lesser career reversals and emerged from them as stronger leaders. This valuable guide to surviving at the top draws on interviews with dozens of high-level executives in business, government, and academia. Ciampa and Watkins let these managers speak for themselves in lengthy quotes that provide enough context to understand each element of leadership under discussion from securing early wins in the first weeks on the job to building coalitions and projecting self-image.

The interviewees speak with a candor rarely if ever found in statements to the press from members of the corporate elite. Equally valuable, though, are the authors’ analyses of the myriad threats sure to beset the new EVP or CEO. It’s no good for the newcomer to rail about office politics, communication gaps, or institutionalized barriers to change in the workforce. The leader needs to understand why these challenges arise, and what elements of his or her own style may be making them worse, in order to overcome them. This book can help the recently promoted cope with those frightening career moments that arise as soon as you get what you’re after.

Briefly noted: two July books try to get inside the heads of employees and employers. Workplace psychologist Leonard Felder’s well-received 1993 book Does Someone at Work Treat You Badly? is out in a new paperback edition (Berkley, $13, 0425165124). Felder retells the traumas endured by his counseling clients at the hands of schemers, screamers, sexual harassers, and other walking job hazards and tells of the techniques that helped victims gain the upper hand. New from British business psychologist Sandi Mann is Hiding What We Feel, Faking What We Don’t: Understanding the Role of Your Emotions at Work (Element, $16.95, 1862044643), which explores why we all wear happy, hostile, caring, or uncaring masks at work from time to time.

Also of note this month: William F. Joyce’s MegaChange: How Today’s Leading Companies Have Transformed Their Workforces (Free Press, $28, 0684856255), a manifesto for a management theory based on assumptions of human capability instead of human limitations. And, from Hollywood biographer Bob Thomas, Building a Company: Roy O. Disney and the Creation of an Entertainment Empire (Hyperion, $14.95, 0786884169) tells the story of the other Disney, Walt’s brother.

Nashville journalist E. Thomas Wood is the author of Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (Wiley).